Have you gotten tired of drudging through all of the menus in NwN just to get to the same spot? Want to help cut down a tiny bit on server lag? Why not direct connect from your desktop?

So... I use this at the moment and it's great... I don't have to go through all of the annoying buttons in the normal NwN just to get to the gamespy menu to access the same server I go on most of the time... instead, I just click the shortcut for the server (details in a moment) I play on and it opens up the login screen, then the character join screen. That simple.

Now for the technical details...

Spoiler:

1) Create a shortcut for nwmain.exe on your desktop or wherever you like.

2) Right-click on the shortcut, then select Properties. You will see a screen with tabs: General, Shortcut, Compatibility, etc.

3) On the Shortcut tab, the Target field should read C:\NeverwinterNights\NWN\nwmain.exe (your exact path will depend on where you installed the game -- make sure your path displayed in this field matches your installation if you did not choose the default location as shown here).

4) add a space after .../nwmain.exe, and add +connect [IP address] (w/o brackets). The full path should then display like this for Aenea: C:\NeverwinterNights\NWN\nwmain.exe +connect 68.2.120.14: 5121

Hope it helps and happy gaming!

Last edited by evilkittenofdoom on Fri Nov 16, 2012 11:26 am; edited 2 times in total (Reason for editing : Edited to put in the newer IP address.)

If you like to connect to multiple servers or want to run NWN and the Toolset from the same shortcut, use this little trick. It is just a simple batch file made in notepad. Only works in Windows. You can do this manually or get my Neverwinter Nights Launcher from the vault.

Open Notepad.

Copy and paste the code below. Edit to your liking.

Make sure "NWN_PATH=C:\NeverwinterNights\NWN" Is pointed to your NWN directory.

Maybe this should be stickied. It is very useful and helps with lag (Player side mainly) from bypassing Gamespy and also it makes Switching from Player to DM simple and quick.The semi-class FAQs should definitly be stickied though.

For those of you who wish to save the log file created every time you run nwn, this is for YOU! You will not need Gnomish Log Rotator because all it does is rename the nwclientLog1.txt file as the current time. In which I have now added. For instructions on how to create a batch file goto the above post.

Things to Note:

NWN_PATH must be set to your NWN directory.SAVE_LOGS can be set to 0 to disable log saving.File is renamed to Month-Day-Year[Hour-Minute-Sec].I have ensured that it will not copy nwclientLog1.txt if it is empty. It will just delete it. Therefore preventing a billion 0 byte sized log files.As before, the Batch file may need to be placed into the NWN directory, if NWN creates a bunch of files on your desktop. I do not know why that happens...If the AENEA logo is messed up just copy the one from hereIf you need to know how to create this in a batch file, click here

Last edited by The Amethyst Dragon on Tue Jan 26, 2010 11:43 pm; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Edited to put in the newer IP address.)

Well you may call me obsessive or just plain insane. But here is it folks, The Neverwinter Nights Launcher...yes you read that right! To my knowledge it's the first and onlyNWN Launcher. It has lots of features that make the old batch files seem like crappy ways to launch Neverwinter Nights. Give it a try now!

Features: Allows you to add servers to Direct Connect to servers via buttons. Allows you to display a banner for the PWs website, which on-click will launch the URL. This can all be configured via the Options Icons when you load up the application. I've retained the Enable Log Renaming Feature. But this time the log is renamed before Nwn launches. Which fixes alot of problems people had with Gnomish Log Rotator.

TIPS for Neverwinter Nights Launcher:

If you like to add Aenea's banner to the launcher just type "aenea.jpg" in the Banner field.

Read the Readme on a full explanation on how to use the Launcher.

You can get fast access to your Log files via a button in the Options tab of the Server Options menu.

Make sure the Game Directory in Options is pointing to the NWN directory. It does not look for it automatically.

Was bored so I updated the launcher with minor update. Due to release of CEP 2.3 and a suggestion, I've added the ability to launch the CEP Updater from the Options menu in the Neverwinter Nights Launcher. No more digging through your NWN folder to find that pesky CEP update shortcut.See post above for link.

The IP address listed in the above post may or may not be correct. I have this working just fine on my laptop, and I am running Windows 7, and the only time I had problems was when I tried to run nwmain.exe outside of the NWN folder.

Is it, by chance, creating a link to the NWN directory instead of executing the nwmain.exe file?

[I was trying to make it easier for myself to play on different servers without conflicting anything, but I settled for just renaming the folders when I want to change over. Anyhow... ]

EDIT : I just checked my icon, and the IP address above was an old IP address. I edited the post and it should be up to date now.

Make sure you start the launcher by running as administrator. You can right click your shortcut or the launcher executable and choose properties, then Find the checkbox for run as admin, check it, and then save the setting.

The only other thing I can think of is if you have some quotation marks around the nwnmain.exe command... Can't remember if the quotes should include or exclude the +connect part... Try it both ways and see maybe...